A Bird in the Hand

Kashrus and shechitah experts Rabbi Chaim Loike and Rabbi Avrohom Reit are on a mission to make halachah a hands-on experience

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

It’s called Camp Yoreh Deah, and last week the camp completed its second year of giving 9th–12th grade yeshivah bochurim an in-depth and practical bein hazmanim filled with learning safrus, shechitah, shofar making and blowing, eiruv construction, matzah baking, tzitzis and tefillin tying, mikveh building, and more (Photos: Jeff Zorabedian, Ari Zivotofsky)

In our modern consumer age, Jewish ritual and mitzvah objects have gone the way of other products, neatly wrapped and packaged with nary a hint of how they originated or what went into getting them from their raw state to the public domain. Who thinks about, or even knows, how matzah is made, where an esrog comes from, how a shofar is fashioned, the backdrop for the writing and making of mezuzah and tefillin, or the origins of that slider in your hamburger bun?

In the typical yeshivah curriculum these issues sometimes arise in theoretical discussions, but at most the average yeshivah guy will wistfully comment, “I wish I knew the metzius,” and then move on. And that’s why kashrus and shechitah experts Rabbi Chaim Loike and Rabbi Avrohom Reit (pronounced “right”) decided to partner and create a hands-on learning experience for teenage boys. It’s called Camp Yoreh Deah, and last week the camp completed its second year of giving 9th–12th grade yeshivah bochurim an in-depth and practical bein hazmanim filled with learning safrus, shechitah, shofar making and blowing, eiruv construction, matzah baking, tzitzis and tefillin tying, mikveh building, and more.

The day we showed up at the camp, located in the rural, one-time farming village of Durham, Connecticut on the campus of Yeshiva Ateres Shmuel of Waterbury, each of the 37 handpicked campers received a pile of raw wool and a spindle with which to practice the skill of spinning (they’d had a lesson on it the day before). Later, each young man would work on preparing his own quill for writing sta”m.

But nothing prepared us for the sight of 37 freshly shechted chickens, which they were going to kasher and eat the next day, as each camper learned the basics of treifos in a halachic “anatomy lesson.” Earlier, Rabbi Loike showed up with over 30 varieties of chickens in order to demonstrate the signs of kosher birds and to highlight the task of the posek in determining which birds are kosher and which are not. While the fact that each camper had to hold and examine one of the chicks might have separated the squeamish from the strong in any other setting, Rabbi Loike convivially introduced the task by noting that anyone who didn’t want to handle a live (and dead) chicken was in the wrong camp.

For years, Rabbi Loike — a longtime talmid of Rav Yisroel Belsky ztz”l and kashrus administrator at the OU who is a world-class expert on the kashrus of birds — dreamed of creating a program to expose bochurim to the practical side of halachic knowledge, and when he teamed up last year with his good friend Rabbi Reit, they created a new educational frontier.

Summer camp is generally viewed as a place to take a break from the year’s curriculum. But in addition to sports and trips, there’s another way to change the routine. Instead of theoretical learning of the classic “yeshivishe” mesechtos, these boys immerse themselves in learning practical halachah with an accompanied “lab” component (although I did catch one camper in the beis medrash learning Bava Metzia during free time). (Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 723